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Update: Sideview Battlers, New Characters, and More!
🕑 Added 2021-02-26 16:26:45 +0000 UTCI hope everyone is doing well and your projects are coming along nicely!
It's been a little while since I posted a general status update to let everyone know how things are moving along and what's on the near horizon.
New Characters
The first two full characters have been released with their unique animations. Overall people enjoy them, though they are not necessarily for everyone, but that's okay. I want to do at least 8 characters and then see fully how folks feel about it. At that point I will also start doing more character pieces as well for the regular characters and Martin's engine.
Speaking of which - if you have not checked out Martin's game engine over in Discord, do so! He has put a ton of work into it and it is an amazing piece of software. If you don't want to make games with it, you can still build maps with it and export them (including making mesh terrain out of textures!) or build your characters and export what sprites you want. Martin is amazing!
SideView Battlers
With the new unique characters, I have started to make true sideview battler sprite sheets for the people who use RPGMaker or just want a sideview battle system. I do not plan on adding this functionality to the character pieces since every single item would need to be redone to accomodate this. But for all new characters and all monsters, this will be part of their included resources.
The sideview battler sheets are set up in the format used by RPGMaker by default (3 animations wide, 6 animations high, following their default setup). The main difference is that mine come with 5 frames of animation instead of 3 frames. You can either use the higher frame versions with a plugin, or you can edit out whatever frames you don't want to include to create 3-frame versions. I believe Martin added (or is adding?) this functionality to his character exporter in his software.
The plan is to release the sideview battlers every so often when I have about 5 or 6 to share (so that way I don't make a hundred new posts with them). They will also be added to the appropriate monster's original post as well for newcomers.
Tiles
Instead of releasing tons of small groups of tiles, I will do far fewer releases of larger groups of tiles. The first such was the new Village tileset that included a bunch of premade buildings and decor. The next set will most likely contain a bunch of either Mythos or Modern style buildings and decor. I still maintain my plan to gradually move on to producing some more Mythos stuff, followed by Modern, and so on. I will also keep jumping back to Fantasy as well because that is the single most popular setting.
Backgrounds?
Using Artbreeder, I am very seriously considering whipping up a bunch of backgrounds using original art as seeder material. I would need to pay for a brief subscription to do so since the free version is very limited. The results are really awesome and perfect for game usage. Would people be interested in this?
The idea would be to generate terrain using my own work for a wide variety of biomes with a large amount of variety to each (deserts, forests, mountains, snow, ocean, rivers, etc etc) and then do a bunch of additional post-work editing, make them higher resolution than what you get by default, etc. The images are free to use commercially.
So that's where I am at the moment! We had a bit of a slowdown in productivity with the big polar vortex that hit a large part of the country recently. Our entire city shut down for a week. But everything is moving along once more. I hope everyone who was caught up in it stayed safe!
Have a great weekend everyone!
-Jesse
Comments
Timothy O'Brian
Amazing work! I stick to my JRPG Roots and I'm always excited to see new sideview battlers!
I love your idea about using your landscape art for making backgrounds with Artbreeder! I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with. Thanks!
